Hello all,
We had our meeting last Thursday. Unfortunately, I managed to schedule it on the same night as the championship football game. So here is a summary of the meeting and some dates of upcoming events that you will need to mark down.
- I need name and contact information for the main contact person in charge of your team and a secondary contact for each team. I will not consider your team active and ready to respond until I have that information.
- If your team is interested in the CERT training please let me know so that I can pass that information along to the CERT coordinator. Once we have enough people interested, we will get a class together.
- I have scheduled a safety/training class on February 7 from 8:00 to 11:30 am. I will not make this meeting mandatory, but I would like to strongly encourage at least one or two members of each team to attend. We will go over personal safety, chainsaw safety, hazard awareness and a few other things. The class will probably be held in Mulberry at a soon to be determined location. I will email everyone as soon as we have nailed that down.
- In the meantime, I will be working on the liability waivers, communication (steve has an idea about that, see below); t-shirts (Nathan-don’t forget) and identification.
Thanks to everyone who was able to attend. I will be sending out more info as I get it together.
As for the communications, Steve Gann called me after the meeting and suggested that the teams become part of the Storm Spotter Network. Since Steve can explain it better, I have attached his email for you to take a look at. I would appreciate any feedback that you might have on this.
Dear Jason
I would like to suggest that we visit with the team members of the Storm Recovery Teams (1 or 2 persons per Church Organization) and let me do a demonstration of our Storm Spotter Network Radar Monitoring Program. We have the possibility to setup a computer aided dispatch program over the internet where we can see when a Storm Recovery Team becomes active ready to respond without anyone having to call in to say they are activated. Storm Recovery Teams can be a part of our County Spotter Network receiving real time severe storm movements through their community. When a report comes in where a home has storm damage they can see the exact storm damage report on Spotter Network. We can communicate via cell phones, AIM instant messaging, commercial ban radio, etc. The Storm Recovery Team who can setup a mobile internet system with GPS, through Spotter Network, can show us the team’s actual location that updates every 120 seconds. Setting this system up will help the county storm ready program, and citizens of our county.
I would also like to invite everyone to our Spring Storm Spotter Class that will be on February 19th, beginning at 7:00 pm in the Exhibit Building at the Crawford County Fair Grounds in Mulberry. We are working on getting approval of a live web cam stream of the class, if the NWS approves, for those that can't join us, but they could log in from home. There may be a limit to the number of viewers at one time for the class.
Let me know of any interest in having this meeting.
Sincerely
Steven Gann
I like the idea of operating with in the storm spotter network since all of what the SRTs will be doing will be determined by the weather.
Please forgive any typos and thanks again to all of you for being willing to volunteer to help make Crawford County a safe place to live. I look forward to seeing all of you at the safety class in February.
Jason
